Your Guide to Welding Photography & Editing | Luminar Neo

Hello and welcome to another episode of Jeff and Angie Photography WTF Stop. So this week we are going to do another edit in Luminar. We're going to take an ordinary image, we're going to put it in there, and we're going to see what we can come up with together. Stay tuned. All right, so today I am going to do something a little different. My granddaughter is graduating this year, so I've gone and I've taken a few of her senior portraits, which most of them are just your typical in your fancy dresses, in your— I don't know, her boots and cowboy hat and all that kind of stuff. But she's actually a welder, and she's been welding for 3 years, and she'll graduate this year with the certificate for welding. So we did something a little different. I took my camera and I went down to her welding class, and we did some welding pictures. So today we're going to edit one of those welding pictures. I'm going to show you how I brought out and enhanced the smoke and kind of go over a little bit of how I took those images. So first, um, I would recommend that you use a telephoto lens. For this, I used my 70-200, and I got as far away from her as I could just so that I didn't get any sparks that would come and land on my lens because I didn't have a UV filter to go over it. If I did have a UV filter to go over it, this is one incidence where I would actually use a filter to protect my lens. But I was able to stay far enough away to where I didn't feel like I was gonna take the chance of getting my lens Damaged. And the funny thing is, when you're shooting somebody welding, you're basically doing it blind. So you have to know where your aperture, your shutter, and your ISO settings are on your camera so you can play with those throughout the whole shoot with a welding hood on, which you cannot see through. All you can see is the bright Which is where she's welding. And after, I don't know, we probably did like an hour's worth of photos there. After going through all the photos, every single picture that she chose and I also chose was the exact same settings. And we'll go into those settings here in the video when we go into the editing. So let's jump on over into Neo and I'll show you how I edited these images. Okay, so just really quick, I'm going to go over those settings that I told you I would go over. So if you are going to go and photograph a welder inside a shop, I would suggest you start at 500 ISO. f/8 and use a shutter speed of about 1/100th of a second and always play with it from there. But that's a really good starting point because every single image that was chosen at the end after the shoot was those exact settings. So anyways, just wanted to bring that up. Back to the edit. All right, so So let's jump on over here to Luminar Neo to do the edits. Here is the before and after. But before we jump into getting rid of all of the edits that I've done to that, I am going to save as preset. And we're gonna call this 1 Welding Solo. And the reason I did that is because I have another one down here that I had done earlier. So we're going to save that, and the reason I'm going to save it is because we're going to go through this image and we're going to edit it together. So I want to revert as original. All right, so here is the original image. We're gonna jump into the editing. So as you can see, the before and after, it's the exact same thing. Get rid of that. So first thing you want to do is you always want to go into your Develop Modular first just because it helps to control the light, and then in the other modulars what you've done in Develop Raw to the light will carry through. So we're gonna, we're gonna start off and we're gonna do a little Smart Contrast, which— and then we're gonna jump into Highlights. And Highlights, we're gonna take them all the way down because I want to get rid of as much of that glow there as possible. And then Shadows, I'm gonna bring it up a little bit. And then we're going to jump down here into black and whites. But when you do that, hit your J key so you can see your shadows and highlights. So in this image, we've got the highlights here where the welding is, which there's no way we're going to get rid of that. And then we got a little bit of dark here in her hair in the shadows, and this area right through here, we're going to crop that out. So let's do the blacks. We're going to— we're actually going to bring those up to about 52, which actually, when you go positive on the blacks, it actually kind of gets rid of the blacks because over here it gets super dark. So kind of going on the positive side of black, kind of removing a little bit of it. There we go. And then whites, I'm actually gonna take and I'm gonna bring the whites all the way out. Then we're gonna go down into Sharpen. We're gonna sharpen the image just a little bit, something like that. And then of course I'm gonna go down here into Lens or Optics, and we're gonna do the lens corrections. And then we are pretty much done with the Develop modular. Now we're going to jump down into Super Contrast. We're going to take the highlight contrast to about 48. Balance, we're gonna Take it up to 100. Midtones, we're gonna bring the contrast up about 39, and then the midtones, we're then going to back them off. Shadows, we're going to Bring that up to a nice solid 50. And then on the balance, I'm gonna go to about 28. And the reason I'm doing that is because I'm, I'm trying to get it to where the background is not so bright because We want to focus right here on this area, just where she's welding. So we'll go ahead and close that out, and then we're going to go into Develop. And notice Develop is now starting fresh as if we've never even been in here. And that's because we did the Develop Raw, and then we went into another modular, which was Super Contrast, did our edits there. And now Develop has now been opened up as another modular, and you can use this as many times as you want. So on this particular one, I'm going to make a mask. I'm going to do a radial Because I want to mask everything out but her. I want to keep her and her welding— where she's welding at, I want to keep it from getting masked out or getting blacked out. Something like that right there. Then I'm gonna go into brush and I'm going to paint a little more mask but not quite 100%, probably 50% strength, and I'm just gonna do right here above her and right below her, trying to keep a nice radius circle around her. Then I'm going to go in here to erase, and I kind of want to Trace where the smoke is. I want to keep all that. Okay, now we're ready to go into our adjustment now that we have our mask, and we are going to take our exposure down Probably all the way. And smart contrast and highlights. So now we're going to take that J key off. So now we have completely blacked everything out. Except for her and her welding. So now I'm going to go in and I'm going to crop this image, but I don't want to keep it to the original ratio. I want to go free, and I also want to take it from horizontal to portrait because I just really just want That area right there. There we go. So now we are going to go in and we're going to enhance the smoke. We're going to do another mask. We'll do a radial. And we'll just have to go in here and invert it. And something like that right there. Yep, that'll work. And then go into our adjustment. We're going to enhance it. We're just going to bring that smoke out. There we go. Before, after. But before we leave enhance, we're going to go down here and we're going to Copy our mask, and that way we don't have to mask it again when we go down here into structure. Now, we need our mask, mask action, paste adjustment. We're gonna do probably somewhere around. Here. Yeah, and then we'll go on and boost this one, probably somewhere right around here. There we go, smoke's really starting to go. All right, so head on over to our affiliate page, click on the link below, and it will will bring you over to our page. And from there, if you're wanting to grab Luminar Neo, click on the link and it will take you right over to Neo. View the plans, and I highly recommend the Pro plan. That's my favorite plan. That's the one I have. And right now they're running a special at $119 a year, and if you enter my code AB15, you get 15% off that already reduced price. So now's the time to buy. And if you don't want a monthly bill, you just want to buy a one-time, you can do that as well at $149. Buy it and it's yours. It comes with all future updates. So you don't have to be worried that you're going to get left behind. Either, either one is a great deal, and either one you get 15% off along with anything else that's on this website as well. Oh, but wait, if you act like you're gonna leave, click I Love Free Gifts and they'll give you 10 free skies with your Pro membership or Explore. But Explore, you're really limited on. I would really suggest the Pro because the Explore is still $119 a year. There's— and that's if you do monthly, but if you do annual, it's $99 a year. But really, $20 more, you get so much more. You get all the extensions, you get everything. All right, so some of our other affiliates. We got B&H, we got DxO. You click this link and it will take you to their website, and you do get a free trial with that. So click that link and go get you a free trial. And we got Promedia Gear, the makers of the best tripods on earth. And you got F-Stop Bags, which are great backpacks, but I especially like them for their inserts. Topaz Labs is another good editing program. I don't use it a lot, but it's pretty good. One of these shows I will show you how I go about using that as well. All right, well, let's jump back on over to the video and let's finish editing. All right, so With that same mask, we're gonna do something a little creative. We're gonna run down here to Glow. We're gonna do the mask. We're going to paste. Then we're gonna invert because this is going to do all of her surroundings. Let me show you here. So that mask that I pasted was of her, but because I inverted it— here we go. Go back into Adjustments, and we're going to go into Orion Effect Soft. Just watch what this does. I really, really like this, this particular image. I'm going to go 100%. And then you go in here and you go to brightness and you take it down. That was before and after. Now we'll go back into— go back to the Develop Modular and do another mask real quick, radial. And that will be— this mask though is gonna be of her. So we'll have to invert it. Basically, it's going to be the area that I want to really lighten up. So I'm going to go over, back over to my mask. I'm going to grab my brush. I'm going to I think I'm going to erase a little bit of the mask because I don't really want— oops, cut her head off. Oh, this is where the new feature comes in. Command+Z. I didn't want to do 100% on that. I only want to do like 50%. That way it's not so bold. All right, go into here, then we're going to go into exposure, and we're just going to Bump her exposure a little bit. Boost the shadows. Do a little before and after, see what it looks like. Before and after. And let's see how close we came to getting this image the same as it was when I started. I did take notes, by the way. So here's the— I came pretty close. All right, so don't forget to hit the like button, subscribe, and ring my bell so you will get notified the next time I post a video. We'll have another video coming up for Luminar Neo. Stay tuned. Should be up in about a week. Thank you. Thanks for watching. Have a great week.